After recently being found guilty of
making pro-Nazi remarks, Jean-Marie Le Pen has now been
caught defending embattled and notorious Syrian President
Bashar
al-Assad in an interview on RadioFrance,
calling him a leader “facing a rebellion which is both civil and
military,” and that it was not abnormal that “the Syrian state is
defending itself.”

He went on to chide the West, saying Assad should not be
criticized by countries who fought Nazi Germany in World War II,
and were themselves responsible for devastating bombings.

While his daughter, Marine Le Pen, has been careful to remain
noncommittal on the National Front’s stance on Syria, saying in a
TV debate that there weren’t “only bad guys or good guys” in the
conflict, according to
France 24, her father, 85 did not hold back.

Le Pen senior dismissed the deaths of the 6,000 people killed in
Syria, saying they were nothing compared to the casualties of
WWII.

“Yes, there is shelling every minute, every two minutes [in
Syria]… But within just 30 seconds in Tokyo, 100,000 civilians
were killed. In Nagasaki, Hiroshima, 80,000 were killed. In
Dresden, 200,000,” he said, before reading out a poem by French
Nazi sympathizer Robert Brasillach.

But Sylvain Crépon, a specialist of the French far right, said
the popularity of the National Front and Marine Le Pen (she is
currently third in the polls) will not take a hit following her
father’s faux pas. “If she’s pressed, she will always argue that
it’s better to have a secular dictatorship than an Islamist
democracy,” he told France 24. “And besides, foreign policy is
not a major concern for most FN supporters.”